Part 16

Then one comes to a house, one story high at the street two at the rear, which has two rooms opening in front and two toward the hollow. In these rooms live an Irish widower and his two children of ten and twelve years, together with a miscellaneous lot of colored people. They quarrel, and have to be watched by the police.

A step farther we meet a Scottish mill laborer out of work. He proudly points to the playhouse he has built for his two little girls "to keep 'em off the street." It is set up against the toilet, but that can't be helped. The mixed family next door pick rags "and carry on" in the shed hard by. The woman there has "chronic tonsilitis" which is dangerous for the children. The mother wishes there was some better place for the children to play.

Up to this point one feels that this is a settlement of mill-ends; mill-ends of people, living in mill-ends of houses, on mill-end jobs, if they work at all. It does not seem possible that anyone could come to live on Ewing street from deliberate choice. With something of a start one finds, in this row of demoralization, a home just vacated by a charitable agency for the help of colored children. It was a temporary home for boys and girls and babies, occupying the ground floor and basement of a house unsanitary and dark, having no gas, no running water, and no yard, only a rickety back stoop, offering an unparalleled view of Skunk Hollow. In a middle room, dark except for one outer window and one cut through into the back room, slept eight or ten children two in a bed, feet to feet, boys and girls from infancy to twelve years. The institution has gone now to a better neighborhood. This particular house hasn't a bad name; it was the one further down that was raided last month. Two under-age girls were found there, but the madam got off with a fine and the girls disappeared. Some other people of doubtful credentials are moving in; maybe they are good and maybe not. They are carrying in their household goods now. They do not look unlike the others of the neighborhood. A thin colored woman stands off and watches, rocking her baby in her arms. She is seized with a fit of coughing, and turns into the dark doorway of her shack. One does not need to follow her to know that she represents one more city problem.

The vantage point for a view of Skunk Hollow seems to be the back stoops of the clingers on the edge of the basin. Here one becomes aware that the hollow is a public dumping ground of ashes and tin cans. As wagons drive up and drop their contents the air itself becomes full of refuse. An occasional thin stream of water trickling down from where you stand. This is the Ewing street sewage making its way to the bottom of the valley.

The hollow seems to follow the bed of an old river; it winds away around a huge hill of gravel where two railroads lie. On a delta between the railroad tracks, the boys have improvised a playground. Farther along there is a straggling bunch of houses. You notice a little girl washing clothes on one of the back piazzas. A little boy runs out and cuffs her until she runs into the house crying, and a man comes out and chases the boy. The boy climbs a neighbor's fence and vanishes. A colored woman and a white woman are seen on the path that winds through this settlement; they go into one of the houses and shut the door. An Italian comes out of the same door a minute later, and walks off down the railway track. The rears of these houses present another solid line of reeking, broken-down toilets with box vaults, unflushed, on platforms built level with the rear floor of the houses. Tucked in between disreputable families of the lowest type are, here and there, bright faced thrifty Italians. Two families have been brought to Skunk Hollow from respectable neighborhoods because of the hard times. In one of their houses renting for nine dollars a month, the rear room is a ten by six, cubicle, with a two by two window in it directly opposite and two feet away from the doorway of the toilet. The air? Well, the window has a solid shutter and when that is closed the air isn't so bad and keeps out disease. As the mother talks, two little chained dogs bark at the babies loaded on her arms, and on the edge of the railing, which prevents the unwary from stepping off the platform into a landslide of rubbish below, fruit and clothes are drying, macaroni is soaking, and busybody flies are hurrying from one thing to another. Any typhoid? Oh yes, the grandmother died with it, and one of the children had it, but was taken to a hospital and got well.

Towards the end of Neville street, in the heart of the hollow, we come to a back yard. The house, for its own reasons, prefers to front on the railroad. In the yard is a large shed patched with odds and ends of all sorts of boards, layer upon layer. The people in the house,--most of whom are "women boarders",--say it is used just to put things in. As a venture you suggest cows? Yes, there are cows there, three, the milk is sold for the babies in the neighborhood. The man says the cows "graze upon the hills around the hollow." He glances at the hills and laughs. It is true the cows haven't grazed there this summer, and in the winter it is best for them to be in a warm dark shed.

As we climb back up the stairs in the late afternoon, we meet the lamp lighter going down with his ladder. Early? Yes, but it is not well to go into the Hollow as late as dusk. There are only sixteen lamps there,--soon lighted, but people have their own reasons for turning them off and few of them burn till morning. The hollow doesn't wish the light. At the end of Ewing street, by the alley of entrance, stand two patrolmen. They are side by side looking meditatively down into the valley. They are watching for the little boy who climbed the fence. "He's a Juvenile Court boy named Matthew S----," they say. "He's home on probation. It's a queer thing about the Juvenile Court, it takes children away and locks 'em up because the neighborhood's bad, and then it sends 'em home on probation." These men, without knowing it, were asking for a single judge for the Juvenile Court. "He promises to do right," one of them continued, "but they ain't enough probation women to see that he does keep straight and he's the worst one we've got on the beat." This one was asking for an adequate number of probation officers. "Now, do you see that tight, brick house down there beyond?" they asked. "That's a colored disorderly house,--run for booze. That little white girl who's washing on them steps goes there all the time. She stays out nights,--away from home. The father works hard and brings home all his money; but the woman,--she don't care. Ain't the Juvenile Court no way of catching the mother? She ought to go to the workhouse." He was asking for an enforcement of the adult delinquency law. The conversation ran on and the patrolman told more of the affairs of Skunk Hollow. He told of speak-easies, and hang-outs of all kinds, masked under the appearance of small grocery shops. At the foot of the stairs, he said, an Italian interpreter was found dead within the year, struck from behind by an Irish-American. The man smoking there and talking to the little girl over the fence had done it, but there was no evidence. Two little children belonging to the colored woman who keeps the disorderly house were playing in the dust. The patrolmen were letting them stay home until they could get them in a raid. "Where do you suppose they'll bring up?" one of them said. "The mother won't get more than a fine and she can pay it."

"Now watch the boys!" said the other. "Here comes a freight." The train wound slowly into a nest of little boys playing ball. After it had passed there was not a boy to be seen. "Catching rides" said the patrolman with an appreciative chuckle. "They'll go round the hill and come back by way of the main street. Then I'll chase 'em in for playing where they ain't no right, and back they'll come to Skunk Hollow. I wish I had some other place to send them." The playground problem again!

On the skyline around the hollow the church spires stood out blacker than the smoke in which the valley was shrouded. An American flag waved from the school house on the main thoroughfare, and the fanciful towers of Luna Park peered jeeringly into this pest hole of neglect. "Shame, ain't it?" said one of the patrolmen.

FOUR TYPES OF HOUSING ILLS IN MILL TOWNS

PAINTER'S ROW

THE STUDY OF A GROUP OF COMPANY HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS

PAINTER'S ROW

THE UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION AS A PITTSBURGH LANDLORD

F. ELISABETH CROWELL

FORMER SUPERINTENDENT, ST. ANTHONY'S HOSPITAL, PENSACOLA, FLORIDA.

The United States Steel Corporation owns property on the South Side of Pittsburgh just beyond the Point Bridge. Here is located the old Painter's Mill, which is one of the plants of the Carnegie Steel Company, which in turn is one of the constituent companies of the United States Steel Corporation; and here, also, stands what remains of Painter's Row, where the company has housed certain of its employes, mostly immigrants. When the Carnegie Steel Company took over Painter's Mill, it renovated the plant so as to turn out the sort and quantity of output which the Carnegie name stands for. When it took over Painter's Row, it did nothing. When, a little over a year ago, and several years after the purchase of the property, I made a detailed investigation of the place, I found half a thousand people living there under conditions that were unbelievable,--back-to-back houses with no through ventilation; cellar kitchens; dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated, overcrowded sleeping rooms, no drinking water supply on the premises; and a dearth of sanitary accommodations that was shameful.

Painter's Row was originally a succession of six rows, some brick, some frame, built on the side of a hill that slopes from the foot of a lofty palisade down to the Ohio. Houses and mills immediately adjoin and tenants are even housed in an old brick building, in another part of which some of the mill offices are located. Sluggish clouds of thick smoke hang over the cluster of roofs and the air is full of soot and fine dust. Noise presses in from every quarter,--from the roaring mill, from the trolley cars clattering and clanging through the narrow street which divides mill and rows into two sections, from the trains on the through tracks above the topmost row and from the sidings which separate the lowest row from the river bank and which are in constant use for the hauling of freight to and from the mills.

* * * * *

(The story of Painter's Row should be considered in its bearings. The United States Steel Corporation is building a remarkable new town at Gary, Indiana; its subsidiary companies have promoted house building along original lines, notably at Vandergrift, Ambridge and Lorain, and the Carnegie Steel Company has fair, low rental houses at Munhall and elsewhere. On the other hand, other Pittsburgh corporations own company houses which have been equally as bad as Painter's Row; and a similar story could be written of a shack at one time owned by one of the foremost Protestant churches of Pittsburgh, and razed to the ground only because the headworker of Kingsley House had the courage to publish its picture and the name of the owner.

We have no animosity in singling out one corporation; but we have a very serious purpose in detailing the facts as to this row of company houses. There is ground for difference of opinion from a business as well as a social point of view, as to whether it is desirable for an industrial corporation to own and rent homes to its employes. But if industrial chairmen, presidents and superintendents become landlords, they must bear the responsibilities of landlords; and only as the public holds them up to these responsibilities as stiffly as their stockholders hold them up to dividends, will they be in position to devise and carry out policies which, as individuals, we may assume they would act upon. This story of one high-spirited New England stockholder and 500 company tenants indicates, moreover, that some investors are willing to lead the public in such demands.

With the standards it is setting at Gary, the United States Steel Corporation cannot afford to be responsible for such conditions as these at Painter's Row, whether in the Pennsylvania steel district, at its mines in Northern Michigan, or at its plants in the South. For the Survey to have selected a lesser, independent company for criticism, would have been to lay ourselves open to the charge of fear of the big offender; for us to have found a more humanly destructive group of bad houses, would have been impossible.

DIRECTOR OF THE SURVEY.)

* * * * *

Dirt and noise are inseparable adjuncts to life in a mill district, deplorable, but unavoidable; but workers in the mills need not necessarily be deprived of sufficient light and air such as it is, and water, and the common decencies of life. In the winter of 1908, I spent several days in Painter's Row. I watched grimy little children at play. I talked with the women, the home-makers; I saw men who had been working on the night shift lying like fallen logs, huddled together in small, dark, stuffy rooms, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion that follows in the wake of heavy physical labor. Above all, I sought to learn how the tenants fared in these three things: ventilation and water and sanitary conveniences.

In the two rows nearest the river, there were twenty-eight houses divided from cellar to roof by a party wall, so that the rooms in each apartment were arranged one above the other; the result was that there was no through ventilation, and consequently the rooms were ill-smelling at all times and stiflingly close in summer. There were in the different rows, twenty-seven cellar and basement kitchens, dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated. Besides these, there were six cellar rooms more than halfway below the ground level, that were occupied solely as sleeping rooms. The windows of these cellars were small, and the little light and air that could gain admittance under the best of circumstances was obstructed by a row of ramshackle sheds which bordered the narrow area upon which these windows opened. There were many other gloomy rooms which it would be but repetition to describe. But the tale of dark, ill-ventilated sleeping quarters would be incomplete without passing mention of a space under a staircase that had been walled off and that was entered from a kitchen. Into this "hole in the wall" a bed had been squeezed by some hook or crook, and there two boarders stowed their bodies at night. I found the worst overcrowding in the row at the top of the hill. In one apartment, a man, his wife, and baby and two boarders slept in one room, and five boarders occupied two beds in an adjoining room. In another apartment of three rooms, the man, his wife and baby slept in the kitchen, their two boarders in a second room; and the third room was sub-let and occupied as a living and sleeping room by five persons,--a man, his wife and child and two boarders. This last room was a small one, containing two beds, a stove, table, trunks and chairs. Once inside, there was scarcely room to turn comfortably.

Not one house in the entire settlement had any provision for supplying drinking water to its tenants. Mill water was piped out to the rows,--an ugly, dirty fluid, which, however tired or thirsty they were, the people would not put to their lips. I asked the question at every doorstep and got the same reply. They went to an old pump in the mill yard,--360 steps from the farthest apartment, down seventy-five stairs. This "town pump" was the sole supply of drinking water within reach of ninety-one households, comprising 568 persons.

The water pumped from the mill was used for cleansing purposes. When the pressure was low, there was none even of that to be had. In only two cases was this wash water piped directly into the house. Tenants in the other houses carried it from bent pipes that emptied into open drains running between the rows, or into troughs at the end of the buildings, whence it had to be carried up two or three flights of stairs if they happened to live in the upper stories. From these same apartments the waste water had to be carried out and down and emptied into the drains. The marvel was not that some of the homes were dirty; the wonder was that any of them were clean,--for against such obstacles cleanliness was to be secured only at the expense of tired muscles and aching backs. I talked with one mother whose two rooms on the top floor were spotless, and whose children were well looked after. Day after day, and many times a day, she carried the water up and down that her home and her children might be kept decent and clean. I looked at her bent shoulders, gaunt arms and knotted hands. Work aplenty,--necessary work,--there was and always will be for her to do, but those shoulders and arms and hands had to strain laboriously over unnecessary work as well. "God! Miss, but them stairs is bad," she said.

As was said at the beginning, when the Carnegie Steel Company took over Painter's Mill, it renovated the equipment of the plant; when it took over Painter's Row, it did nothing.

One row of four houses had waste sinks in the apartments and another row of one-family houses had a curious wooden chute arrangement on the back porches, down which waste water was poured that ran through open wooden drains in the rear yard to the open drain between this row of houses and the next. A similar arrangement had been made for the convenience of six families living in the second story of the row of tenement houses, where two wooden chutes from the porch above carried the waste water down to the curb at Carson street. They carried other things besides waste water,--filth of every description was emptied down these chutes,--for these six families, and three families below on the first floor had no closet accommodation and were living like animals. Some families disposed of slops and excreta in the way just indicated; others used a bucket containing ashes, which was emptied into a wooden garbage bin on the street at the end of the row of houses.

Officials of the mill company, when this condition of affairs was pointed out to them, replied that the vault in the rear of this row of houses was built for the use of these families as well as for the other nineteen families in these two rows, and that they could secure a key to a closet compartment by applying for it at the offices. As a matter of fact these people had never been offered keys and they volunteered the statement to the investigator that they had no closets. The vault just mentioned was halfway up the hill between these two rows of houses. To reach it, anyone living in an end apartment in the second story front would be obliged to walk half the length of the second story porch to where the inside stairs led down to the street, then along the street (for the sidewalk was but two and a half feet wide, and completely covered with old lumber and debris of every description), then up a difficult flight of outside stairs, steep and with narrow treads, then two or three steps on the level, then more stairs, and so on until one had taken a hundred and eighty-six steps, sixty-five of which were stairs. This was called "closet accommodations" for want of a better term.

Equally bad conditions prevailed in the row of houses nearest the river. Closets for these houses were formerly located across the railroad tracks on the edge of the bank. During the flood in the spring of 1907, these were swept away and had never been replaced. The twelve families living in this row also used buckets and emptied the contents into the river. One family in the next row of houses claimed that they had never been given a closet key. In all, twenty-two of the ninety-one families were living without the first elementary conveniences that make for sanitation. The full evil of this state of affairs is not really clear until one remembers that these families were occupying two-and three-room apartments, nearly all of them having several children, and anywhere from two to five boarders each.